Selfies are pretty cool, everybody’s posting them. Merriam-Webster just added the word Selfie to the dictionary. The most retweeted tweet ever posted was a selfie from the Oscars.

If you’ve heard the latest novelty dance music hit #SELFIE you’ll recall that the song’s protagonist ponders aloud which filter she should use, X-Pro II or Valencia. After hearing it for the millionth time, it struck me that there is a data-backed answer to that question.

I did a little preliminary investigation and found that there has been no large scale analysis of selfie posting yet done. So I gathered a dataset of just over 160,000 Instagram images tagged with #Selfie and did some analysis. I looked at filters, tags and colors to find out exactly how you can post your most liked selfie yet.

Dan Zarrella

Dan Zarrella is the award-winning social media scientist and author of four books: “The Science of Marketing,” “Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness,” “The Social Media Marketing Book” and The Facebook Marketing Book.